“I said, did you hear what I said, Claire?”
“Sorry. What?”
“Didn’t you know the Medicino girl? The singer in Carmela’s play? Theresa Medicino? Wasn’t she in your Brownie troop or something? You know, the one who married that Andy Dover fellow, the one does so much for the P.T.A.?”
“Ma. What are you talking about?”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, dear. That she died. Up and died just like that. Be laid out at Mahegganey’s tonight. You knew her, didn’t you? I’m sure you did. You used to call her, what was it, something funny … Treeza, no. Tree. Remember, Claire? Gee, she was young. That’s why you’ve got to live your life now while you’ve got it, for who knows—Claire? Are you all right, Claire?”
Claire was looking straight ahead at Tree. She was watching her, and Tree was smiling, her sharp little teeth very white in her face. She was standing in front of the house Claire so wanted. Dead in front. Her dun, fairy bells of brown hair would be framed now forever in sunlight and ravishing foxglove.
CHAPTER 2
Mahegganey’s Roman Catholic Funeral Parlour on Myrtle was all white, polished, grim and Colonial, run by, of all things, a Protestant. The place, like some dreaded relation caught sight of years later, was in no sense a stranger to Claire. Her own twin brother Michael had lain there a young man, a boy, crisp in his New York policeman’s fine uniform, not worn long enough to be shiny from ironing. A waste. A dead waste. Claire sat in the car a while longer and looked at the place. She could still see her mother and father, arms clasped around each other, holding each other up there in the vestibule, sodden with grief, bewildered by the fanfare of Police Department tribute.
The show of support had been fantastic. There’d been no end to the steady stream of young men and women coming and going in uniform. It had even, Claire smiled through her great rush of sadness, been beautiful. Well. That was then and this was now. She’d never recovered; she’d run away for ten years, that was true enough, but she’d come back. And now she had a life. A good life she refused to feel guilty for. With trembling fingers, Claire reached for a cigarette, then realized she’d given it up more than four years ago, when she’d become pregnant with Anthony.
The parking lot of this place was rarely as full as it was today. Even the streets. Up and down, the cars were wedged one up against the other. Another florist’s truck arrived, double-parked, and dropped off one more extravagant arrangement. The smell of flowers reached right out to the street and it all came back to her, right down to the mahogany casket that had housed her silent brother.
She did not hesitate going in. These were her things, her memories, no one else’s. She wasn’t going to let anyone find her outside looking at this place, remembering. If she saw somebody, anybody, watching her with an oh-look-at-the-poor-thing look on their face, she would lose it. She couldn’t afford that. Falling backwards after all these years. Michael was dead and that was that. She was fine. Just fine. She took the steps at a brisk gallop. The very cement beneath her feet came back to her, with cracks just the way they were back then, those steps she’d memorized and thought she’d forgotten. Ah, well. Just do what you have to and be gone, she reminded herself. No one’s looking at you, and even if they are and feeling sorry, is it the worst that could happen? Don’t they have their own dead to remember? Is there anyone who doesn’t have their own sorry dead to remember?
She walked forward carefully. She wouldn’t want anyone to come up to her and actually show her sympathy, take her arm, believing her not to be able to handle it.… She wouldn’t have it. Then a surge of not caring lifted her, freed her from the desire not to be pitied. If they pitied her, then that was all they could see, because that would be all that there was. She felt the strength she had earned from her grief. She wasn’t going to deny it now so that they wouldn’t feel a certain way. Claire did feel the cold sweat underneath her arms and on her lip and the ringing in her ears. She sat down slowly in the back of the room when someone got up. She would just sit here. Not move, not try to get up. She wouldn’t fall down if she just sat here.
The crowd was backed out to the street. Well, of course it was a well-attended wake. Such a young woman. One whose husband is as active and well liked in the community as Tree Dover’s. There she was. Oh my God, there she was. Claire would look at the flowers and not at the wax-white profile of Tree. In that box. She couldn’t bear the thought of looking at her old friend turned to wax the way her brother had. She couldn’t bear it. Claire tasted the back of her hand, brown and salty, alive. She stood, tripped over someone’s feet, struck through arms and legs and people’s still summer clothes, and made her way through the crowd and down the hall, out to the hazy porch filled with smokers. She found an empty folding chair at the back.
“Doesn’t she make a magnificent corpse?” the woman behind her said.
Claire looked at her blankly.
“Oh, sorry. I’m Mrs. Rieve.”
Claire, always polite, always, even on the brink of nervous collapse, extended her cold hand to the sinewy, outstretched one offered her.
“This is the best spot,” the woman continued loudly. “You can still see the body but you can talk if you like. Know what I mean?”
Claire closed her eyes.
“You ask me,” Mrs. Rieve whispered suddenly, “it was that wild life-style killed her. They don’t lay you out in your red dress for nuthin’, you know. And I don’t buy that coroner’s bit. About a stroke.”
“What?”
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire, I always say.”
“Mrs. Rieve, I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but it was a creepy feeling that gusted through her insides and raised up the hairs on her neck. People did, after all, kill people. It happened every day, according to the papers.
“Why, surely she must have confided in you—aren’t you the one who wrote the play?”
“Mrs. Rieve, I only just moved back to Richmond Hill.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Rieve regarded Claire with one wary eyebrow up.
Claire caught sight of the husband, Andrew, who was shaking hands up near the casket. Tree was indeed dressed up in scarlet, Claire was shocked to see.
“Looks more like he’s runnin’ for office than grievin’ for his dead wife, don’t he?”
Claire silently agreed. How could he have put her in red? There was a very pretty woman standing near him, also shaking people’s hands. Claire wondered who she was. She seemed to have the situation well in hand, whoever she was. Kindly pointing out available seating to flabbergasted old ladies, directing women with children to the rear. You couldn’t fault the woman. She seemed tremendously wholesome. Her high color came from Nordic eons of oatmeal and salt seas, not makeup, and her natural blond hair, very thick and dark and rich, was restrained for the moment in a severe, if bursting, bun.
“Who’s she?” Claire couldn’t help asking Mrs. Rieve.
Mrs. Rieve snorted. “You mean Goody Goldilocks? That’s Portia McTavish. You don’t know her? Oh. I guess you’d be older, wouldn’t you?”
Stung, Claire heard this woman’s radiant name with a stab of instant jealousy. Now she could never name a daughter that. Here was a name she’d kept in her hat all these years and now tzak, just like that, along comes this one. And not bad to look at, either. She is, Claire was suddenly more interested to see, downright pink in the cheek whenever anywhere near the handsome, bereaved Mr. Andrew Dover.
One couldn’t blame her for that, surely. Andrew Dover seemed well liked by just about everyone. Claire wondered where the little daughter was. Who would be with her, the poor kid? Tears welled up at the thought of her own Anthony facing life without her if she were to die. Who would love him the way she did? Oh, it didn’t matter about the name Portia. She was lucky she had her one child. At least somebody out there had that lovely name to live up to.
And then, Carmela came in. Trust Carmela to stop the show in a navy-blue s
uede Italian design with black trim and matching lamb’s wool beret. Still ridiculously warm for that sort of thing, mulled Claire, anyway glad to see her. Carmela walked right past her, though, after paying her respects. Blowing in one door and out the other, without a glance at the common folk all sitting there; she just kissed Andrew’s cheeks, then Portia’s, deposited a waft of Cartier in the already heavy air, then was gone. Probably ready to drop dead from the heat herself if she didn’t get out of there. Claire was glad she hadn’t informed Mrs. Rieve that that was her sister. Even Mrs. Rieve was rendered mute at the sight of big-time Carmela, wife of a diplomat, a woman who knew how to carry herself. She’d probably come in the limo and had the chauffeur at the door. Made sure everybody got a gander. She wore, Claire almost laughed, gloves. There was a pack of Marlboros on one of the standing ashtrays. It looked mighty inviting. What the hell. She hadn’t had a cigarette since she’d gotten pregnant. She was only waiting for a good reason to pick them up again. And when there was a good reason there was never a pack around. This was certainly as good a time as any. She opened the cellophane. Already her head swam in nicotonic expectation. She held the bugger up. Ah, sophistication. She put it between two ready lips. And then she saw the little girl outside the open door, sitting on the concrete steps. It was just the back of her head, but it had to be her. Those ringlet curls. Just the way her mother’s used to look. Claire put the cigarette down and walked outside. In the driveway an elderly woman sat upright, open-mouthed and sound asleep at the steering wheel of a seen-better-days Coup de Ville.
Claire knew better than to say hello. She searched her purse for something to intrigue a child. Nothing. Of all days. Here was a woman who couldn’t pull out a charge card without a Ninja Turtle sticker attached to it, who carried yo-yos in her makeup bag—and here she comes up empty. Claire dropped to her knees. “Oh, my God,” she said, so the kid looked up, “I’ve lost my contact lens. Do you think you could help me?”
She was already certain no one could do enough for this child, and so of course no one could reach her. Claire remembered her own grief and how she couldn’t get out of it until Swamiji had needed her help. So Claire was going to need this kid’s help. “My son, Anthony,” she started right in talking as she groped the ground, “he’s almost four. Well. We just moved. Right across the street from you, as a matter of fact and Anthony, he’s depressed because he’s got no one to play with. Well. You’re an only child, too. You must know how it is. I’m just thinking. Seeing as how we live so close by and …” She rambled on that let’s face it, he was becoming a problem and, gee, this was really good her running into her like this because she didn’t know where to turn. Claire asked, did she think she could ask her father if they could work something out? Like maybe help her a little bit with Anthony? And what was her name?
The child, looking not in her eyes but at the open back door of Mahegganey’s white-and-green funeral parlor, shivered. “My name,” she said to her, “is Dharma.”
Now that Claire had secured the child’s father’s offhand permission to take her away, what was she going to do with her? Anthony would still be on his excursion to Toys “R” Us with his grandparents. Claire drove up Freedom Drive through the only road still open through the park (the rest was permanently reserved for joggers), then thought better of it. The woods would undoubtedly remind Dharma of happier times with her mother. What child grew up near Forest Park not learning happiness from good times playing Big Ball with her mommy under the pines, ice skating on her ankles around the carefully choppy pond, waving every time around to Mommy, tasting summer water on her face from the cement sprinkler?
No. She cleared her throat, deciding she’d drive her somewhere else. A different way, where Dharma had never been. Where she herself had never been, for that matter. As long as she had Dharma with her she would not break down, wouldn’t sin. It would fit in nicely. One more day of abstinence. Tomorrow she would smoke. Claire drove up Park Lane South, made a left on Metropolitan, and then a right onto the Northern State Parkway. “So. Where shall we go?” She looked optimistically into the rear-view mirror. There was Dharma. Huddled as one can be by a window, looking out, her top teeth over her unsteady bottom lip tight as a vice, her mother just dead. Her father willing to let her ride off with a neighbor he’d only just met.
“I have a terrific idea,” Claire barked, her voice beany cheesy on a ledge. “There’s this dog. Some dog. My brother-in-law, Freddy, he’s married to my sister, Zinnie, the detective, she’s an undercover policeman is my sister Zinnie, and … I’m sorry, what? Did you say something?”
Came a wee voice: “I said I know Zinnie. She’s Mrs. Stefanovitch’s sister. The lady who came to the wake in the limousine. Her sister. There’s a rich one and there’s a poor one.”
It took Claire a good moment to digest this news. “That’s right,” said Claire. “And the funny thing is, Mrs. Stefanovitch is my sister, too. The brunette, the blond, and then me in the middle. Red. Sort of. Did you know that?”
“No,” she said, the voice a bit more there.
“And who do you like the best?”
“I like Zinnie very much,” said Dharma, more certain than before.
“Yes, I suspected that you would.” How like Zinnie to go by her first name, even with a child. And how very like Carmela to be “Mrs. Stefanovitch.” Especially with a child.
“Well,” Claire continued, not caring if she rambled, just to get the child’s attention, keep it off her own reality, talk to her as though she were an adult. Don’t patronize the poor thing, she hissed inwardly, it won’t work. Claire had heard her newly-aroused grandmother do it at the funeral parlor and she’d watched Dharma patronize her right back. She’d not do that to her. If she’s lost her mother, holy God, didn’t she deserve to be talked to on at least an able-to-deal-with-it level, so eventually, she would be? “My sister Zinnie’s ex-husband gave away a puppy because the puppy peed all over his very expensive carpet, you see. He gave the dog to the North Shore animal shelter. I thought we might take a ride out there and visit it, see how it’s doing, sort of. Would you mind if we did that?”
“No,” Dharma said, not wild about the idea from the tone of her voice, but not against it, either.
“Thrown away, the dog?” she asked.
“Mmm,” answered Claire, uninterested as she could sound.
“We don’t have to meet the man who threw the dog away?”
“Him? No, just the dog.”
“Oh, I’d like to meet that dog.” Dharma smirked sarcastically, one eyebrow raised up in stunning replica of Tree’s in childhood. “Sounds like a helluvan animal.”
They drove north in companionable if stressful silence.
They drove south with the dog in Dharma’s lap.
“What we’ll do is this,” Claire chattered brightly, “we’ll keep the dog overnight and tomorrow we’ll bring him over to school and ask who wants a puppy. Surely there are plenty of families who’d love to have a puppy. Kids only have to look at a puppy and they fall in love.”
“You might as well face it,” Dharma said, very matter-of-fact, “no one’s going to fall in love with this little runt just from looking at her. You’re going to have to think of some hard-luck story to sell her with.”
Claire noticed Dharma’s good funeral parlor dress was wet all around the mangy dog. That meant her leather seat was also wet. Claire sighed. Dharma sighed. The dog, wounded, car sick and baffled once again, sighed too.
“And I said,” Johnny shouted from behind the bolted door, “you’re not getting in this effing house with that effing, filthy dog!”
“Johnny, please. Be reasonable. It’s just for the night.”
“Ha! That old one. Forget it!”
“Johnny—”
“I said no!”
“Johnny—”
“Claire, go away and come back without that mutt and I’ll open the door.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.” She was just abo
ut to add that he might let her in just to get some rags and Murphy’s Oil Soap to mop the back car seat when she realized this would do little to help her case. And what if Andrew Dover were across the street watching her husband bar her and Dharma from their house? Who was this barbaric entity to whom she’d bound her very life? Why had she married this man? She remembered very well why. She hadn’t wanted to be one of those perfumed frowzy women in everyone’s family who has no family of her own and so comes dressed up and laden with cream cakes, sitting on the outskirts, but always taking up the comfy chair on each and every holiday.
She had wanted her own life. Her own clan. Her own children. And yes, her own man to fight with. And when they’d found that she was pregnant, that week when every coffee she drank tasted fishy, he had been more than adamant. She’d kept herself single up until the fourth month, just in case they lost the baby (in which case there would be no reason to marry) but she hadn’t lost it, she’d grown and blossomed and continued to bloom, seventy-five pounds she’d put on, in fact, and the whole time Johnny would walk her anywhere she wanted to waddle. And he would always walk a little bit ahead and to the side like a football tight end, one hand extended and ready to knock over anyone coming too near. God, how they loved each other, these two disbelieving, cynical misfits, suddenly believing, suddenly fitting. Their eyes would meet with liquid love across any miserable moment or place, and the whole room could feel it. Well, maybe not. People said later they couldn’t believe how fat Claire had become. “I’d like to see them give up two compulsive packs a day like I did, cold turkey,” she’d think complacently, smugly, schlurping her black cherries over vanilla Carvel.
Foxglove Page 3
